I was in an interview recently and asked a question that I commonly do to the interviewer: ‘What do you find bootcamp graduates are lacking in most?” I’ve received a lot of good pointers from this question with answers such as “computer science fundamentals,” “they don’t ask enough questions,” and “experience with an existing code base.”
Whether you’re a Computer Science (or related) college graduate, a recent bootcamp grad, or a self-taught software developer trying to get a job, practicing for a real technical interview can be very difficult. You can read Cracking the Coding Interview, and practice on various coding problem websites (Leetcode, CodeWars, HackerRank, etc), but until you go through the actual experience of doing it on a video or in-person when the clock is against you, you never quite know how you will react.
First off, did you know there was more than one type of array? If you’re a junior developer that has only studied Javascript, CSS, HTML, and Ruby like me, you may have thought that dynamic arrays (or just ‘arrays’ as they’re referred in JS) are all there is.
When you start out prepping for technical interviews, you could use any number of resources (Coderbyte, HackerRank, CodeWars, etc), and the temptation is to figure out an answer, and then memorize it - or look up the solution and memorize it is generally a strong one.
I didn’t major in Computer Science or a related field in college so while mathematics and problem solving have always been something I pride myself on, practicing algorithms was not a common occurrence for me.